But you must also remember that gold certificates, derivatives etc. may also be described as paper gold, as long as their value reflects the value of gold itself but is not backed by real, physical metal.

The main risk when you buy paper gold is that your counterparty will fail either to deliver physical gold or to pay you for your shares in cash. The former one is pertinent mostly to gold certificates or pool accounts, the latter to ETFs.

With gold certificates it’s pretty simple – someone may issue a gold certificate, promise to deliver actual gold and fail to keep their promise. With ETFs it’s a little bit more complicated. The basic idea is that if gold ETFs don’t have enough gold to back their shares, they might not be able to redeem them.

The main principle of gold ETFs is to keep their price in line with the price of physical gold. They do that by adjusting the supply of their shares. An ETF increases the number of shares when theirprice is at premium to gold, and redeems shares when their price is at discount to gold. When an ETF creates new shares, it receives money from investors. This money is typically used to buy gold. Conversely, when an ETF redeems shares, it sells physical gold and uses the acquired money to pay investors for the shares they’re holding. The argument is that some ETFs may not buy enough gold, so when too many investors want to get out, the ETF may not be able to pay up.

And if you invest in an ETF it may be reasonable to hold physical gold as well. Defaults of ETFs would most probably cause physical gold to rocket, which would compensate for losses on ETFs. You should keep those factors in mind when investing in an ETF. You wouldn’t want to be left out in the cold should anything unpleasant happen to the ETFs.

Holding paper gold enables one to get exposure to the price of gold without having to possess physical bullion and is considered more useful for trading purposes than for long-term investments. Examples of paper gold include: gold certificates, pool accounts, gold futures accounts, and most exchange traded funds (ETFs).

Paper Gold Instead of Physical Gold - Why?

The first answer is that you might want to avoid storage costs. If you invest a sizeable part of your capital in physical bullion, you might not want to keep your metal at home (you’ll need a safe and perhaps other additional equipment). In this case, you might prefer to choose a custodian – an institution that stores your metal for you. This storage service is not free of charge (neither is transportation to the storage facility, nor its insurance), so you need to take this cost into account, and it diminishes your returns on gold. By buying paper gold, you get a paper that more or less reflects the price of gold and allows you to avoid the cost and headache of storage.

In addition, paper gold enables you to invest in gold even if you don’t have enough capital to buy an ounce of gold. This is because ETF shares,or similar investment vehicles,usually reflect less than one ounce of gold – most commonly they follow the price of 1/10 of an ounce. If you do not have enough money to buy a full ounce, ETFs might be a solution. This is another reason for the popularity of ETF vehicle with individual investors.

Is Paper Gold Safe?

You might ask yourself whether it is reasonable or safe to invest in paper gold if you do not actually possess the metal you bought. This is an important question, because by buying paper gold you get exposed to counterparty risk (the risk that your transaction partner will fail to fulfill their promises).

In short, that’s ok if you use only a small portion of your capital for purchasing paper gold (for instance by speculating on its price moves), but it may become problematic if a large amount of capital is at stake (long-term investments). For example, if you buy a gold ETF share, you get a paper that trades roughly in the same direction as does gold. You may sell it to any other investor just like a stock and receive money.Please note, however, that most ETFs do not allow redemptions in gold. In other words, if you want to sell your ETF shares, you will not be able to exchange them for gold.

The ETF tries to make the price of its shares tradewithout direct connection to the demand for these shares. If many investors are willing to buy shares of a particular ETF, the price of these shares will most likely go up. In such a situation, an ETF (along with its partners) issues more shares to weaken the price pressure and backs the new shares with physical gold or some kind of derivative on gold (like futures contracts). As a result, an increased demand for the shares of an ETF will result rather in an increase in share numbers than in the surge in the price of a share.Conversely, if the demand for these shares is low and pulls the price down, then the ETF (and its business partners) will sell a part of its physical holdings and use the acquired cash to redeem existing shares. Such an action limits the supply of shares and pushes the price back up.

The above mechanism is important, as concerns have been raised that ETFs may not have all of their shares backed with physical gold.This would mean that the overall value of shares issued by a given ETF exceeds the value of gold this ETF holds. At first, it may seem of little relevance, as you usually cannot exchange your shares for gold with the ETF. However, after a short consideration, such a situation begins to look unsettling.

The main reason is that when you want to exchange an ETF share for cash, the ETF (and its partners) has to obtain this cash to redeem your share. If the ETF holds physical bullion, it may simply sell an appropriate part of its holdings to get the desired amount of money. On the other hand, if it does not hold physical bullion and runs out of cash (for example because of default on the futures market), it may not be able to pay you for your share – and this would be a default of the ETF. In this case you would lose your money instead of gaining it by selling gold at very high price.

As long as the demand for ETF shares is sound and you are able to sell them to other investors (and not to the ETF), even ETFs without enough physical gold will manage to make good business. However, if there is a default in the gold derivatives and/or gold declines and/or the demand for these shares falls significantly, it may turn out that such ETFs are unable to redeem all of their shares.The less physical gold the fund actually holds, the higher the probability that in an extreme situation you may find yourself out on a fragile limb.

The Golden Rule

If you invest in gold ETFs it is crucial to choose either the funds that allow redemptions in gold (there are only a few such ETFs) or those that have their shares fully backed by gold. Apart from that, you should always remember about diversification – in this case it would mean holding both physical gold for long-term investments and non-physical (futures, options, ETFs, pool accounts, certificates) for small, quick trades. If the derivatives market collapsed, then the rocketing price of your physical holdings would more than compensate for the losses on the speculative paper gold. This is why diversification is important in this case.

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Related terms:

Exchange Traded Funds track the value of a particular index, commodity (for instance a gold ETF tracks the gold price) or currency and its highly liquid shares can be bought and sold just like stocks on the stock exchange. ETFs may be attractive as speculative vehicles because of their low costs, tax efficiency, and stock-like features.

Exchange Traded Note (ETN) is a debt security (derivatives) issued by an underwriting bank, whose value depends on the movements of a stock index or some other benchmark. They were created by Barclays in 2006 and have become an alternative to ETFs. Gold ETN is an instrument designed to track the price of gold and silver ETN is an instrument designed to track the price of silver.

Gold market manipulation, called also gold price manipulation, can be defined broadly as a purposeful effort to control gold prices. This sort of manipulation exists in financial markets as traders try to influence the markets (in this case, the gold market). It may be responsible for some short-term aberrations in asset prices, including the price of gold. However, there is another, more specific definition. According to the Security and Exchange Commission, manipulation is intentional conduct designed to deceive investors by controlling or artificially affecting the market for a security… [this includes] rigging quotes, prices or trades to create a false or deceptive picture of the demand for a security. A popular belief within the gold investing community is that gold prices are manipulated, generally downwards, in what is described as price suppression.